Tag Archives: Conventions

Archive Seasons 7-10, Career and Lifestyle, Guest, Live Audience, Q&A, Season 10

Writing Excuses 10.51: Q&A on Showing Your Work, with Daniel José Older

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Daniel José Older joins us for a Q&A on showing your work around. Here are the questions, which were submitted by attendees at the Out of Excuses workshop:

  • What’s the best way to meet editors and agents at conventions?
  • How do you write a good query letter?
  • What do you mention as credentials in your query letter?
  • You didn’t cover self publishing at all this month. Self publishing is legit, right?
  • Can you submit the same work to more than one agent or editor at a time?
  • Can you re-submit a revised work to an agent who previously rejected the piece?
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Write a query letter for a book that you love, but did not write. Then write a query letter for your own work.

Mystic, by Jason Denzel, narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal

Archive Seasons 7-10, Career and Lifestyle, Guest, Live Audience, Season 10

Writing Excuses 10.49: What Do I Do With This Thing Now?

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We’re at the end of our Season Ten Master Class, and if you’ve been diligent about the homework, you may very well have a finished manuscript in your hands. What do you do with it?

Daniel José Older joins us for a bit of reminiscence. We talk about some of our first submissions, and what we did right, wrong, and weirdly. We cover our criteria for selecting publishers to whom we’d like to send our stuff, and we include the shiny intangibles in that list.

 

This episode was engineered aboard The Independence of the Seas by Bert Grimm, and mastered in an abandoned missile silo by Alex Jackson.

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Research the market for that thing you’ve written. Find things that are similar to what you wrote, and read up on who published them. Find out who the editors were. Then make a list of places where you’d like to submit your work.

Half-Resurrection Blues: Bone Street Rumba, Book 1, written and narrated by Daniel José Older.

Archive Seasons 7-10, Career and Lifestyle, Demonstration, Guest, Season 10, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 10.37: Being a Good Panelist and a Great Moderator, with Susan J. Morris and Marc Tassin

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This month’s wildcard episode comes to you from the 2015 GenCon Indy Writers’ Symposium, where Dan and Howard had the opportunity to interview Susan J. Morris and Marc Tassin. Susan is one of the finest moderators the symposium has ever seen, and Marc directs the event, building the schedule around good panelists and great moderators. Their advice is insightful, fresh, and spot-on. If you ever find yourself scheduled to speak on, or moderate, a panel, this episode is a great listen for beginning your preparation.

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You’ve been invited to BobCon, and when you arrive at BobCon you realize WHY it’s called BobCon. How do you escape?

A Darker Shade of Magic, by V. E. Schwab, narrated by Steven Crossley

Archive Seasons 7-10, Career and Lifestyle, Guest, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.45: Tools for Writing from Oral Storytelling

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M. Todd Gallowglas is a writer and a storyteller who has spent years doing traditional oral storytelling at renaissance fairs. He joined us at FantasyCon/Westercon 67 before a live audience and talked to us about how this tradition has informed his writing, and how these principles can inform our writing as well. He also schools us (okay, mostly Howard) about how these principles should be informing parts of our podcast.

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Take the book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and drill down into the nitty-gritty realities of pancakes falling from the sky.

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss, narrated by Nick Podehl

Archive Seasons 7-10, Career and Lifestyle, Guest, Live Audience, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.42: The Convention-Author Relationship, with Deirdre Saoirse Moen

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How does a convention play into your career as an author? How might you expect to be participating in programming? How, in short, do you get to be on panels?

Deirdre Saoirse Moen, who organizes fan-run literary cons and schedules programs for them, joins us to talk about programming from the convention’s point of view. Conventions want to create engaging programs, and want authors to be able to participate in that. Authors, of course, want to do things that ultimately result in selling more books. These goals are not incompatible, but there’s a trick to getting them to mesh well.

We also talk about what you should do when you find yourself on a panel — things to expect, things you can do to prepare, and some things to take care to not do.

By the way, registration is open for the 2015 Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat. We talked about that mid-week, and appended that bit of audio to the end of this episode. If you’d like to discuss the event, here’s the place to do so. That’ll keep all the questions and answers in the same place!

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Write your bio in four lengths — one each at 25, 50, 100, and up to 500 words.

The Saint: The Original Sinners Book 5, by Tiffany Reisz, narrated by Elizabeth Hart

[CONTENT WARNING: Explicit about all the things.]

Archive Seasons 7-10, Career and Lifestyle, Guest, Live Audience, Q&A, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.38: Q&A at Westercon

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Peter Orullian joins us in front of a live audience at Westercon 67 for a Q&A. The questions include:

  • As a writer, how do you handle reviewing other people’s books?
  • How do you compartmentalize your writing to prevent that obsession from displacing everything else?
  • How do you create frightening, unique creatures?
  • What are the basics about networking at a convention?
  • Is there a yield for the average story idea?
  • What rules do you follow and what rules do you break when writing epic fantasy?
  • What can you do in critique groups to teach craft if you’re avoiding prescriptive critique?
  • How strongly do you believe that the audience won’t remember what you’ve told them, but will remember how you said it?

 

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Write about a support group for writers.

Spellcaster by Claudia Gray, narrated by Khristine Hvam.

Archive Seasons 7-10, Guest, Live Audience, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.34: Science Fiction as Science Education

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When Writing Excuses was invited to be guests of honor at Westercon 67, we had the opportunity to interview numerous guests of the convention, each of whom were luminaries in their respective fields.

We met Brad Voytek, who is a doctor of neuroscience and a professor of computational neuroscience at UC San Diego, for the first time right there at the show, and immediately knew that we wanted our listeners to have the chance to hear from him. One of his passions is treating science fiction as a gateway to (and in some cases an actual example of) science education.

He starts by talking about Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep, which teaches the reader about the brain by telling the story of what would happen if a zombie walked in to the emergency room. Mary talks about Launch Pad, the NASA workshop for writers. And then Brandon tells us about blending vegetables into junk food…

We grill Brad mercilessly, and have great fun with the whole show as we talk about some of our favorite science fiction, and a few of our favorite starting points for learning actual science.

 

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A sapient sheep desperately needs a delaying tactic. If it gets shorn, bad things will happen.

The City & The City, by China Mieville, narrated by John Lee.

Announcements & News, Career and Lifestyle, Theory and Technique

Writing the Other Workshop and Retreat

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WtO logo

If you wanted to register for the Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat and didn’t get in, I’m hoping that you might be interested in the Writing the Other Workshop and Retreat.

It’s held at the same location, Mary Robinette Kowal’s parents’ house.

Mary will be joined by NY Times Best-selling author David Anthony Durham; Cynthia Ward and Nisi Shawl, the authors behind the book Writing the Other; and K. Tempest Bradford, author and activist.

On Writing Excuses, some of the most common questions come in as variations of “How do you write someone who isn’t like you.” Many authors struggle to write beyond what they know and write the other. While we tackle this on the podcast, fifteen minutes is not enough time to delve into this tricky and nuanced skill. The Writing the Other Workshop and Retreat is designed with lessons and conversations, paired with a retreat, to give participants an opportunity to work on making their characters and worldbuilding deeper and more thoughtful. And David, Cynthia, Nisi, and Tempest really are that smart.

I hope the same urge that makes you listen to Writing Excuses will allow you to consider attending this retreat.

Eventbrite - Writing the Other Workshop and Retreat